BLAKE2b-SIMD

Pure Go implementation of BLAKE2b using SIMD optimizations.

Introduction

This package was initially based on the pure go BLAKE2b implementation of Dmitry Chestnykh and merged with the (cgo dependent) AVX optimized BLAKE2 implementation (which in turn is based on the official implementation. It does so by using Go's Assembler for amd64 architectures with a golang only fallback for other architectures.

In addition to AVX there is also support for AVX2 as well as SSE. Best performance is obtained with AVX2 which gives roughly a 4X performance increase approaching hashing speeds of 1GB/sec on a single core.

Benchmarks

This is a summary of the performance improvements. Full details are shown below.

asm2plan9s

In order to be able to work more easily with AVX2/AVX instructions, a separate tool was developed to convert AVX2/AVX instructions into the corresponding BYTE sequence as accepted by Go assembly. See asm2plan9s for more information.

bt2sum

bt2sum is a utility that takes advantages of the BLAKE2b SIMD optimizations to compute check sums using the BLAKE2 Tree hashing mode in so called 'unlimited fanout' mode.

Technical details

BLAKE2b is a hashing algorithm that operates on 64-bit integer values. The AVX2 version uses the 256-bit wide YMM registers in order to essentially process four operations in parallel. AVX and SSE operate on 128-bit values simultaneously (two operations in parallel). Below are excerpts from compressAvx2_amd64.s, compressAvx_amd64.s, and compress_generic.go respectively.

    VPADDQ  YMM0,YMM0,YMM1   /* v0 += v4, v1 += v5, v2 += v6, v3 += v7 */

    VPADDQ  XMM0,XMM0,XMM2   /* v0 += v4, v1 += v5 */
    VPADDQ  XMM1,XMM1,XMM3   /* v2 += v6, v3 += v7 */

    v0 += v4
    v1 += v5
    v2 += v6
    v3 += v7

Detailed benchmarks

Example performance metrics were generated on Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v3 @ 2.40GHz - 6 physical cores, 12 logical cores running Ubuntu GNU/Linux with kernel version 4.4.0-24-generic (vanilla with no optimizations).

AVX2

$ benchcmp go.txt avx2.txt
benchmark                old ns/op     new ns/op     delta
BenchmarkHash64-12       1481          849           -42.67%
BenchmarkHash128-12      1428          746           -47.76%
BenchmarkHash1K-12       6379          2227          -65.09%
BenchmarkHash8K-12       37219         11714         -68.53%
BenchmarkHash32K-12      140716        35935         -74.46%
BenchmarkHash128K-12     561656        142634        -74.60%

benchmark                old MB/s     new MB/s     speedup
BenchmarkHash64-12       43.20        75.37        1.74x
BenchmarkHash128-12      89.64        171.35       1.91x
BenchmarkHash1K-12       160.52       459.69       2.86x
BenchmarkHash8K-12       220.10       699.32       3.18x
BenchmarkHash32K-12      232.87       911.85       3.92x
BenchmarkHash128K-12     233.37       918.93       3.94x

AVX2: Comparison to other hashing techniques

$ go test -bench=Comparison
BenchmarkComparisonMD5-12           1000       1726121 ns/op     607.48 MB/s
BenchmarkComparisonSHA1-12           500       2005164 ns/op     522.94 MB/s
BenchmarkComparisonSHA256-12         300       5531036 ns/op     189.58 MB/s
BenchmarkComparisonSHA512-12         500       3423030 ns/op     306.33 MB/s
BenchmarkComparisonBlake2B-12       1000       1232690 ns/op     850.64 MB/s

Benchmarks below were generated on a MacBook Pro with a 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7.

AVX

$ benchcmp go.txt  avx.txt 
benchmark               old ns/op     new ns/op     delta
BenchmarkHash64-8       813           458           -43.67%
BenchmarkHash128-8      766           401           -47.65%
BenchmarkHash1K-8       4881          1763          -63.88%
BenchmarkHash8K-8       36127         12273         -66.03%
BenchmarkHash32K-8      140582        43155         -69.30%
BenchmarkHash128K-8     567850        173246        -69.49%

benchmark               old MB/s     new MB/s     speedup
BenchmarkHash64-8       78.63        139.57       1.78x
BenchmarkHash128-8      166.98       318.73       1.91x
BenchmarkHash1K-8       209.76       580.68       2.77x
BenchmarkHash8K-8       226.76       667.46       2.94x
BenchmarkHash32K-8      233.09       759.29       3.26x
BenchmarkHash128K-8     230.82       756.56       3.28x

SSE

$ benchcmp go.txt sse.txt 
benchmark               old ns/op     new ns/op     delta
BenchmarkHash64-8       813           478           -41.21%
BenchmarkHash128-8      766           411           -46.34%
BenchmarkHash1K-8       4881          1870          -61.69%
BenchmarkHash8K-8       36127         12427         -65.60%
BenchmarkHash32K-8      140582        49512         -64.78%
BenchmarkHash128K-8     567850        199040        -64.95%

benchmark               old MB/s     new MB/s     speedup
BenchmarkHash64-8       78.63        133.78       1.70x
BenchmarkHash128-8      166.98       311.23       1.86x
BenchmarkHash1K-8       209.76       547.37       2.61x
BenchmarkHash8K-8       226.76       659.20       2.91x
BenchmarkHash32K-8      233.09       661.81       2.84x
BenchmarkHash128K-8     230.82       658.52       2.85x

License

Released under the Apache License v2.0. You can find the complete text in the file LICENSE.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, please send PRs for any enhancements.